On March 13, 2026 StockTrak is releasing its grand update to our Assignments system – a major improvement with big impacts on classes relying on this crucial feature!
What are Assignments on StockTrak?
Assignments are a list of tasks an instructor can give their students to complete as part of their StockTrak session. This can range from activities through the platform (such as “Make a trade” or “Watch a tutorial video”), as well as graded lessons and quizzes.
Our assignments system is also the backbone of our gamified Badges and Certificates students earn as they progress through their sessions and our curriculum library.
What is new with the new Assignments engine?
This is a from-scratch rebuild of our assignments system designed to accommodate the growth in ways classes have leveraged assignments over the last decade. While the “look and feel” does not significantly change from our previous version, there is a whole new engine under the hood.
These are the biggest changes professors need to be aware of for their classes:
Grading Change for Non-Quiz Tasks
All assignments track both “Completion” of tasks and “Grade”. Grade is most relevant for quiz tasks (where students have a given score they earned on the quiz).
Previously, tasks without a quiz (for example, “Make 10 trades”) did not explicitly stored grades. Instead, we showed the user’s progress towards completion of that task, and excluded the task itself from grade calculations.
With the latest update, the user’s completion towards these tasks will now be counted as their grade for the task, and “Completion” will always be either 0% (the user has not fully completed this task) or 100% (the user has completed this task). This allows all tasks in an assignment to contribute to the “overall grade” for consistency across reports.
“Allowed Retries” is now “Allowed Retries”
What seems like a simple name change is actually a very big deal! The previous assignments system allowed professors to flag individual lessons as “retriable”, meaning students could re-take the quiz as many times as they liked.
Our new system has a single setting for an entire assignment – “Allowed Retries” – which is a number (1 by default). Students are allowed to re-take quizzes in this assignment only as many times as allowed – not infinitely or none. Pre-existing assignments that allowed retries have been imported into the new system with an allowed retries of 10 by default.
Allowed Retires also slightly changes how grades are calculated. The reported grade is the student’s highest grade within the allowed attempts, not just their last score. It also connects with our previous “minimum grade” feature, where quiz attempts below the minimum threshold are not counted towards the limit of total attempts.
Unrestricted Assignment Editing
The previous assignments system would “close out” a student’s progress after completing all tasks in an assignment, which could cause problems if an instructor added or removed tasks once a student had already made some progress.
The new system allows infinite editing of any assignment – student progress is automatically (and retroactively) re-calculated whenever an assignment is created or edited based on the current assignment settings. This also means that grades and recorded progress will automatically update if you change a minimum grade or allowed number of attempts at any point, giving far more flexibility to make adjustments as your class progresses.
Uncapped Assignments
Our previous system had several “caps” in place – no more than 300 students in a session for reports to function properly, no more than 100 tasks in an assignment, and no more than 30 assignments in a class session.
Our new engine is far more robust to huge classes and huge assignments – all of these restrictions have been removed. Reports will work for classes of any size, and administrators can create as many assignments with as many tasks as best suits their own unique class set-up.
Badge and Certificates Update
Our badge and certificate system is also directly based on our assignments engine. While the available badges and certificates have not changed, our new logging system makes delivery of both badges and certificates far more reliable for students. This update also introduces 2 important changes for both badges and certificates:
- Students are now notified in the StockTrak message center every time they earn a new badge or certificate
- All badges and certificates based on completing any lessons now require students to earn a minimum grade of at least 50% to count towards progress of that badge or certificate
The assignment engine roll-out is retroactive, with all assignments created over the last 2 years across all class sessions automatically imported and transitioned into the new system. However, with every change-over, hiccups are possible. If you or your students notice any discrepencies after our March 12 switch-over, notify us at support@stocktrak.com or through our on-site live-chat and we will investigate as soon as possible!
-Kevin Smith, Director of Product Development